Category Archives: Copywriting

Recent updates to Google’s algorithms have hit internet companies as big as Ebay so don’t feel too depressed if you’re website has seen a drop in traffic of late as you’re definitely not the only one. The most recent updates seem to have hit sites that haven’t bothered much with good content but relied on poor quality back links to boost their website traffic. I’m afraid the Colchester SEO Company has never gone in for that sort of SEO and prefers to optimise clients’ sites based on good SEO practices across the board combined with superb well written keyword enhanced content. This might be a little slower but it’s cost effective, results in steady visitor growth to your site, with an ongoing improvement in ranking and gets you the right sort of customers with no fear of your website being demoted to page 14 on Google because you didn’t do things properly.

In the last few months we have seen a steady increase in clients whose websites have serious issues, from keyword stuffing and masses of mirror content to lots of poor quality back links. Many of these sites don’t even have the basics of good SEO in place and their placing on Google has plummeted losing them valuable business. Content is easy to deal with and the mainstay of good SEO these days but getting rid of back links that have made Google down-grade your site can prove fiddly and costly. We do have a way round it though, which is both cost effective, quick and efficient. So if you’ve seen you’re website traffic plummet and you’re not sure what to do about it, then give as a call on 01206 530010 or email sue@thecolchesterseocompany to find out more.

Not optimising your website is like printing promotional leaflets and leaving them on your sideboard

Here’s the second part of the ten points to help you get a better understanding of SEO.

6. Your keywords actually matter

You can’t pick keywords out of nowhere and choose them to be the ones you’d like to rank for. Some keywords are worthless and this is worth remembering when you hear those magic words “we can get you to page one of Google for your search terms”. Your search terms might not be the right search terms and generally you pay an SEO company to find the right search terms for your products but make sure they don’t use uncompetitive ones as it’s easy to get you to page one for those but you won’t get much business from them.

If you haven’t properly researched your keywords then there’s a good chance that some of them, or even all of them, might be word or phrases that nobody’s searching for. Equally some of them might be so competitive they are unachievable or won’t convert and deliver a return on investment for you, which is what you are ideally after. Ranking means nothing unless the keywords you use convert into customers. The worst case scenario though, is that you haven’t even thought about keywords on your website.

7. [Click Here] is never good anchor text

This is something I see a lot on websites. If you know what the terms or keywords that will convert for you are, use them. “Click here” is not SEO friendly anchor text.

8. Your rankings don’t tell the whole story

Where you appear on the page i.e. your ranking on a search engine is important. It is quite often what you are paying your SEO consultant for. Saying that, there are other measurements of your website’s performance that you might want to look at as well.

Such as:

Increased Conversions

Time Spent on Site

Visibility

Brand Sentiment

You should be able to see the whole picture not just one tiny viewpoint.

9. It’s not all about you

Sorting out the search engine optimisation on your website is more about your customer than it is about you. You are making it easier for you customer to fulfill their objectives and aims. Give them benefit driven text as well, whichtells your prospective clients what you can do for them rather than telling them all about you and you should get a better conversion rate.

10. In 2012, it’s not whether you’ll invest in SEO, it’s how

If you have a website then you need to think about SEO. So many companies view their website as a holding page or pages where you can find their address and telephone number. Your website is or in many cases could be an amazing marketing tool that drives leads to your company and converts them into customers. So now’s the time to start thinking about how SEO can bring you more clients.

Lots of companies seem to take an either/or approach to organic SEO and adwords campaigns and I have to say this is a bit of a mistake as they can work very effectively together. Also using adwords can sometimes help to sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of keywords quickly and with a low outlay.

The type of website you have is important and informational sites benefit more from good strong organic SEO and may not even need to go down the adwords route, except for a boost to certain areas or for specialised long tail search terms. E-commerce
sites benefit best from good organic SEO and adwords combined but many only go in for the latter as they see this as the most effective.

It’s a little know fact that adwords campaigns on poorly optimised sites cost more and are also less effective because the ads for these sites get shown less than ads from well optimised sites.

Google places high importance on text relevance on the page you are sending traffic to on adwords campaigns as well, so if your page has little or no relevant text your ad might not even get approved and shown. Some e-commerce sites have very little static text and consequently get penalised by Google for relevancy which impacts on the cost and success of their ads. I suppose it’s perceived that the adwords campaign will compensate for all these deficiencies but that’s not actually the case.

You get much better and more cost effective results from your adwords campaigns if you pay as much attention to the organic SEO on your site as you do to your adwords campaigns.

If you want further information on how to get the best out of your website using both organic SEO and adwords then please contact sue@thecolchesterseocompany.co.uk

For search engines, keywords are an essential element as searches are matched against them and in short, that’s how the search engines find and display your website. Google gives a lot of attention to the keywords in the title tag but also expects those same keywords to appear in the text, headers etc to show relevance.

So, it’s very important to use the right keywords on your website for the best SEO results and it’s important where you use them and how many times you use them. I strongly believe that this is the one of the first things you should think about when setting up your new website (or revamping your old one) and that it shouldn’t come third to design and content. From an SEO point of view it’s not much good if the text on the pages of your website is full of words and phrases that you think sound great but nobody actually searches on.

A good example of this is was when a friend of mine set up her website to sell holidays in Greece. The website looked gorgeous but on most of the pages there were only occasional mentions of Greece and a couple of mentions of the destinations she offered and nothing much about the types of accommodation. The tags were even worse. There was a lot of talk about how they offered an expert service for individuals who wanted a different holiday experience etc etc. This was great as they are selling their speciality service and it was very benefit driven copy but how were people going to find the site in the first place. Nobody goes to Google and types in “holiday for the independent traveller,” they type in “Villas in Greece” or “Apartments in Greece.” So these are some of the keywords they should have been emphasising.

You can sell your product once you’ve got the visitor on your site and it’s very important that you do so as you want to convert the visitor into a customer but don’t confuse the marketing with the selling. Marketing in the case of websites is about getting the customer onto your site, the selling begins on your site when your content makes them pick up the phone or fill in the enquiry form. You can’t sell your service to the search engine, it’s only interested in the keywords and the keywords you want are the ones that people are searching on. Anyone can get you to page one of Google for a search term that nobody searches on, what matters is getting your website up the rankings for searches i.e. keywords that people are typing it into Google and other search engines.

There are lots of keyword tools out there so it is possible to do the research yourself but that’s perhaps the easy bit. You then need to use the right keywords, in the right places, in a way that sells the benefits of your product and makes the customer want to buy it. Not as easy as it sounds, which is why a lot of companies are now turning to professionals for help. It’s not a big investment to get your website copy keyword rich, benefit driven and well optimised but it certainly pays dividends.

If you require further information on Search Engine Optimisation, keywords, copywriting or any of the other services offered by the Colchester SEO Company contact sue@thecolchesterseocompany.co.uk.

Even if you get lots of visitors to your site, does it say what it should to attract customers to go that step further and contact you. Remember, marketing is about getting customers to contact you, selling starts when they contact you. You can’t sell to them if they don’t know you are there so your website marketing is very important. SEO or Search Engine Optimisation should be a fundamental when it comes to marketing your website as it’s one of the most cost-effective ways to do it long-term, but you also need to remember that your website should sell to your visitors when they get to it. So, I am going to give you the first two points of a checklist to think about when you look at your website to see whether you’ve got it right or not.

You need to be honest when assessing your own website and sometimes it’s a good idea to look a your competitions’ websites as well. You might think they look better than yours but in terms of the basics, they might actually be worse. I worked on a website that didn’t look particularly good but at its peak, it pulled in 7,000 visitors a month as it was incredibly well optimised and organised. Saying that it may not have converted those visitors into customers so readily as it had been written in the days when it was common practice just to brag about yourself and in general tell your web visitors how wonderful you are. Which brings me to No.1 on the checklist.

1. Is your website full of “we”. If so you need to change this. You are guilty of talking about yourself and talking at your customers, a bit like the boring person at a party who talks about nothing but themselves and how good they are at everything. We all hate people like that and we switch off so why talk to visitors to your website (who are in fact potential customers) in the same vein. Use “You” and speak directly to your customers and about your customers, not yourself.

2. Do you talk about what you offer throughout your website without a thought for how that translates for your customers. If so you are selling features and not benefits. Potential customers are not so much interested in what you offer as how it will work for them. What will they get out of it? So sell benefits not features. If you product is different and that difference will give benefits for your customers sell those benefits not the features.